While exploring the life of his human subject, Downing also effectively draws us to visit Tuscany, to stay and absorb its...
Downing (The Calligraphy Shop, 2003) delivers an illuminating biography of Janet Ross (1842–1927), who led the Anglo-Florentine community through the belle epoque and into the 1920s.
The early-19th-century seekers of wisdom and beauty landed in Florence and rarely ventured into the countryside, preferring to wallow in the culture of the cities and enjoy the affordable cost of living. Ross and her banker husband, Henry, first lived in Egypt for years, where she immediately showed her inherited talent for mixing with the locals and becoming one with her environment. She descended from a matriarchy of independent, self-sufficient women who imbued her with a great sense of self-worth and an inquiring mind and whom she described in Three Generations of English Women. In 1865, the Rosses moved to Florence in post-Risorgimento Italy and found her family’s contacts and her quick ability to learn languages opened all doors for them. They rented a country villa, and Ross soon became the Padrona, working side by side with the peasant farmers and learning to dare una spintarella, or give a nudge, a crucial art in Italy. Her wide network of friends and relations ensured a steady flow of interesting visitors to their last home, Poggio Gherardo. She was not necessarily a personable woman; in fact, she was often rude, ornery and surly, but most put up with her. But her love for Italy and the Tuscan countryside was unquestionably pure. “If our current collective obsession with Tuscany is another version of the ‘sickly love’ of the Anglo-Florentine’s,” writes the author, “Jane’s was a healthy love—measured, skeptical, informed, slow-building, and ultimately deep and more rewarding for all that realism.”
While exploring the life of his human subject, Downing also effectively draws us to visit Tuscany, to stay and absorb its magic.Pub Date: June 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-374-23971-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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